Ed Michaelson: Missions and Planting 500,000 Churches in India

Missions
Written By JD Bauman

Summary:

In this episode we speak with Ed Michaelson. Ed lives in London and directs 500k, an organization which supports 800 church planters in rural India. Ed shares his story of why he went from emergency room doctor to non-profit founder, and which missions careers are most effective in furthering God's kingdom.

Some things we touch on in this episode…

  • The value of mission trips

  • Windows of opportunities in global missions

  • Why church planting might be much more effective than bible translation

  • How to plan a career in church planting movements

  • Why you probably shouldn’t become a traditional missionary

Articles, organizations, and other media discussed in this episode

  • Link to Ed’s 500k.

  • Hudson Taylor, a faith missionary to China, played a significant role in inspiring Ed to follow missionary work.

  • Empart is an international development organization empowering and partnering with communities to pro­vide voca­tion­al skills train­ing, relief and devel­op­ment, hygiene edu­ca­tion, and med­ical care.

  • Mission India and New Generations are examples of other church-planting and disciple-making organizations.

  • Accord Network gathers Christian relief and development organizations.

Episode Highlights:

Windows of opportunity in missions

[01:22:47] “I was talking about these windows of opportunity earlier. Let's go with the Great Awakening in the UK and the USA Methodist revival. Loads of people came to faith like God's spirit was working. If I had to choose a time to invest resources in the UK and the USA, I would have done it at that moment in time, because God's spirit was at work. And right now we can see that's what is happening in India as we speak, whereas we weren't seeing that 100 years ago when British missionaries were there and missionaries from other nations.”

Need for Christians in this space

[01:03:27] “The amount of need is enormous. I think we're just like scratching the surface of it. So I think we need a lot of people both to pursue high income careers so they can donate to support. We need a lot of people to be having roles more similar to mind and being a part of those organizations, doing that, empowering distributing those funds, helping the strategies on the ground.”

Against Christians becoming missionaries

[01:12:14] “I wouldn't be a big supporter of anyone in today's world being a missionary in the traditional sense, like my heroes evolved Hudson Taylor I wouldn't recommend anyone doing that partly it's just becoming very difficult to a lot of governments won't take Westerners coming in as missionaries like Hudson Taylor did. Secondly, it's incredibly expensive. Thirdly, I think it's people often aren't very effective. They don't know the language, they don't know the culture. All kinds of barriers are there plus the world is a different world to when Hudson Taylor went.”

On the value of learning-trips

[01:27:39] “I would really recommend exposure to traveling and seeing these places. I mean, that's what happened to me, and that can potentially be very, very impactful. That changed the trajectory of my life. And I think it could change the trajectory of other people who are on that place as well. What I would really encourage them to do would be to find an organization which is doing well, what they're passionate about. So if you're passionate about seeing lots of people come to faith and come to know Jesus, I would say come and visit India with 500K in one of our teams. Or do that to one of the other organizations that I've mentioned.”

What it costs to fund 800 church planters in India

[00:12:43] “The budget is more like £900,000, which includes a few extra things, but essentially it's not far off.”

The impact of church planters

[00:12:43] “We've done some number crunching. So these 800 workers, plus another 100, 120 or so who have come off the books and now aren't being funded anymore. They're in aggregate, they have worship meetings happening in 3754 villages. Across those villages there's, there's just over 38,000 people attending those worship meetings. And 14,800 people are at the point where we'd say, this is a baptized church member.”

  • Full Transcript

    [00:00:02.890] - JD

    Today I'm speaking with Ed Michaelson on 1 billion unreached people and catalyzing church planting in South Asia. Very fascinating topic today. Ed runs a group called 500K Churches. They're trying to make Christ known among unreached people groups in rural India. Ed is an emergency room doctor. He wanted to have as big of a kingdom impact as possible. And he thought about becoming a medical missionary. Realized he could have more impact by earning money in London and funding church planters to do missionary work in rural India. He realized it didn't have to stop with him. He could start an org that would fund church planters across a broader region. And now he funds, through his organization 500k eight hundred church planters which have funded upwards of 3000 churches with over 30,000 regular attendees. He does this for a budget of under 1 million U. S. Dollars. Dollar for dollar, 500K might be one of the most impactful church planters out there, but there are many more.

    [00:01:19.690] - JD

    We talk about that. We talk about whether this is too good to be true, how to balance efficiency with doctrinal consistency, and how you can discern an impact in a career that tackles global missions. Ed, thanks so much for coming on.

    [00:01:36.400] - Ed

    Joy to be here. Thank you.

    [00:01:38.300] - JD

    Could you take a moment to share a bit about your background and your story, how it is you came to this calling to work in missions?

    [00:01:49.090] - Ed

    Yeah, well, so right now I work a couple of days a week as a doctor in the emergency room in the Er. That's my headmaking, if you will. That's what pays the bills. But my real passion is the work I do for an organization called 500K, which I set up and I lead. And we're all about supporting and empowering indigenous church planting work in South Asia, particularly in India. Indigenous missionary work. How that came to be? That story really begins with my parents. Every night they would get me and my brother and two sisters together. We would have a time, we would pray, read the Bible, and they would read to us some stories, particularly missionary stories. And these stories just captured my imagination like nothing else. These were adventure stories that really happened. Like, take the story of Hudson Taylor. This guy really got on a boat. He really traveled to the other side of the world and that really took him five months to do to get there. He arrives, he faces all kinds of difficulties and struggles. There's a civil war going on. Faces incredible persecutions, oppositions, difficulties, pains in his own life.

    [00:03:05.610] - Ed

    And what was apparent was really two things. First of all, here's a guy who's got something worth dying for. There's no doubt about that. He's risked his life to do this, but in the process, he seems to have discovered the secret of really living as well. You read his journal, his encounters with God, his relationship with God, the peace, the purpose, the joy he experienced. He discovered the secret of really living as well. And not only that, but God used him to impact an entire nation. So growing up, I was hearing these stories and I just thought, wow, I want in on that. I want to do the same thing. I want to follow in Hudson Taylor's footsteps. I'd like to be a missionary myself. In fact, that was even why I enrolled in medicine. It's what Hudson Taylor did before he went onto the mission fields. I thought, hey, I'm going to do the same. Got my place at medical school. And just before I went, I took a year out to get some experience, particularly mission experience. And I met an Indian guy who was sharing stories with me of what God was up getting up to in India.

    [00:04:14.280] - Ed

    And I heard these stories and I thought, these sound like the stories that Mum and dad read to me growing up. And when he said, does anybody want to come and see it? I just felt, hey, these are the people I've spent my whole life wanting to emulate. But I thought they were all locked away in the past. 100 years ago, 150 years ago. You're saying they are still around today and I can meet them? Count me in. And essentially went out there, traveled India and wasn't disappointed. Got to meet men and women following in the footsteps of Hudson Taylor, risking their lives, often for the sake of the gospel. And there I was.

    [00:05:00.000] - Ed

    Again and again in these tiny villages, worshipping in tiny little house churches. And I just had a sense of, here I am worshipping with this little church. But five years ago, the gospel had never made it to this village. 2000 years of history since Jesus came, nothing not made it. But since these last five years, the gospel has been proclaimed and this community has come to know Jesus. And I just felt, wow, what I am experiencing here, this is history in the making. You could say, who cares? This is just a few believers in the middle of nowhere. It's pretty irrelevant. But for me, if that community has never heard about the good news of Jesus and now people are worshiping him, that's history in the making. And this was when the real shift began to take place for me, because I was observing this and I thought, okay, this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. At the same time, I had this real passion for sharing the gospel and for evangelism. I had been all the training courses. I was always sharing my faith with friends. But I was funny. It was fairly tough going, and I'd be happy if I could persuade a couple of my friends to come along to church with me.

    [00:06:19.400] - Ed

    But here were other people in India, a lot of them only a few years older than me. I was 19 at the time, planning churches into previously unreached villages. And I just had a moment where I felt, you know what? I don't think you guys need me coming to you as a missionary. You're already doing it far more effectively than I can. How can I be a part of what God is doing here? How can I be a part of what you're doing? And what they said to me, I found very interesting. They said, Well, Ed, we've got these people who are trained and ready to go. We've got this manpower. But so often people aren't getting out into action because there's no money to send them. And actually what we need is people just to be generous and people to give. And I heard that and I actually thought, huh, that's really cool because that's something I can actually really easily help with. Getting my friends into church, getting them interested in Jesus. It happens. But it can be difficult, it can be slow going. But making money, I can do that. I mean, that's easy.

    [00:07:28.830] - Ed

    I just have to turn up at work and I make money. I don't even have to be particularly good just being there. Money comes in.

    [00:07:35.970] - JD

    I hope you do well as an emergency room doctor at your work. I hope you do well. So you were working as a doctor at the time, and you then made this decision that you would raise up some of your own personal funds to support these missionaries.

    [00:07:49.830] - Ed

    Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Certainly some people hear me telling me this story, and they're kind of like, I don't think I'd want you as my doctor. I'm like, yeah, if you find yourself in my part of London school rules, starting to feel a little bit sick, just try and make it to the next part, make it to --, and then there's no chance that you'll have me as your ER doctor. Okay, sorry to come back to your question. Yeah, essentially I said, look, how much do these guys need to be supported? They said, in your terms, about £60 a month. That's $80 a month, or approximately $1,000 a year. And I just thought, Whoa, that is crazy. This is the coolest thing I've ever seen. And it's saying it's not happening. With such a small amount of money, plus that's money I can easily generate, and that can be a big multiplier effect. If I go as a missionary, I might be just one person, and it might cost $100,000 for me to be sent. But if I work as a doctor, I could earn a similar amount of money to that, potentially more.

    [00:08:53.960] - Ed

    And if I'm willing to live as a missionary, live a basic lifestyle, I could donate that money instead. There could be a huge multiplier. Rather than it being just me, just one missionary, there could be a multiplying factor of 2040, 60, if you look at just the numerical terms, potentially even 100. And I just thought, that's awesome. That's what I want to do. And that's what I've been doing since and since then.

    [00:09:15.250] - JD

    You've started an organization to find pastors, indigenous pastors in India, and to fund them, to help them pursue vocational ministry. Could you give us a sense of the arc of your organization and some of the successes, some of the biggest successes you've had?

    [00:09:34.150] - Ed

    Yeah, well, just one clarification, I would say we don't support pastors. It's quite an important distinction. So we'll support church planters, and the way we do that is we come alongside church planting groups within India. Each of these church planting groups will have a training center or a Bible college at its nucleus. So they will be training people often. It's a twelve month program.

    [00:10:00.090] - Ed

    These people will be taught they'll know the basics of the faith already, but they'll be taught more advanced stuff, as well as some practical tools for how to go out and share the gospel and plan a church and to lead that church. What we found was that in India, these church planning groups are springing up, and you'll see these nascent training centers all over the place. But the gap that we identified was a lot of these graduates, one then getting sent and weren't getting into the work. And so we said, well, that's the gap that we can plug. We can pick up the graduates coming from these centers and then deploy them. So if you take us at the moment, we're working with eight of these different church planting groups. Each of them have their training center, perhaps 30 graduates each year, 40 graduates each year. We take those graduates, we plug them into our program where they get sent out. We'll give them five years of funding inclusive of a weaning down period. And during that time, they plant the church, and they then get supported by that church or find some other stream of income to keep them going when our funding stops.

    [00:11:11.030] - Ed

    As the reason I make that distinction, I think it's quite important. If there's already a pastor who's effectively doing ministry, I don't see any benefit in giving him a salary. In fact, it can be harmful because you go from a financially independent pastor to a financially dependent pastor. Whereas if you can focus on sending out new church planters so we can accelerate and incubate that church plant and then withdraw after that five year funding period, then you're laughing. So, yeah, we launched back in 2014. Back in 2014, we were supporting 30 church planters, and that was with one church funding group. Now it's 100 church planters across 78 church funding groups and continuing to rapidly grow and rapidly expand as God enables us.

    [00:11:57.100] - JD

    So in about eight years, you've gone from funding just a couple of church planters to funding about 100 church planters and helping establish, what is this amount, to several hundred churches in rural India.

    [00:12:10.730] - Ed

    Yeah. So just to clarify those numbers, we were supporting 30 church planters at the beginning because the project had already been kind of going before we launched 500K. Now we're supporting 800.

    [00:12:21.790] - JD

    800? Yes, I heard 100. Okay. 800 church planters.

    [00:12:26.170] - Ed

    Right.

    [00:12:26.750] - JD

    So does the math work out pretty literally where the first person asks you for about $1,000 a year, have you been spending, on average, about $800,000 to fund 800 church planters?

    [00:12:43.250] - Ed

    Yeah. So right now, our budget is about $900,000. I'm used to working in pounds. I'm having to do some quick conversions in my brain. Yeah, the budget is more like £900,000, which includes a few extra things, but essentially it's not far off.

    [00:12:59.450] - JD

    So in terms of people coming to church, in terms of the number of churches out there, that are being spearheaded by these church planters. How many people are showing up on Sunday because of the work guided by God and the Holy Spirit, but through the work of these church planters, are we talking about a few hundred church attendees? Are we talking about a few thousand? Have you crunched the numbers on that before?

    [00:13:24.530] - Ed

    We've done some number crunching. So these 800 workers, plus another 100, 120 or so who have come off the books and now aren't being funded anymore. They're in aggregate, they have worship meetings happening in 3754 villages. Across those villages there's, there's just over 38,000 people attending those worship meetings. And 14,800 people are at the point where we'd say, this is a baptized church member.

    [00:13:57.130] - JD

    Yeah, that's incredible. All in a matter of eight years partnering with that amazing growth that God is springing up out of rural India. Can we talk a bit about the problem of global missions and just this whole area of the gospel not being known in many parts of the world? Could you just sketch out how this situation is broadly, but maybe also specifically in South Asia and what drew you to India? I know there are many similar kinds of needs in other places in the world, but yeah, I guess in short, why is global mission something that Christians should care about? Of course, we've all heard about the Great Commission. We all know that the Gospel will be proclaimed to all people in all tongues, tribes and nations, before Jesus returns. But there are many causes Christians care about. We care about poverty, we care about tending to creation. What is it about missions that is so compelling to you?

    [00:14:57.790] - Ed

    Yeah, that's a really great question. Thank you, JD. For me, a part of it would be in that Great Commission, go out and preach the gospel unto all nations, baptizing people in the name of the Father and Son, Holy Spirit. That's certainly a part of it. For me, like, even more, I find myself coming back to that verse in Matthew 13 where Jesus says that the kingdom of heaven is like a man who stumbles upon treasure buried in a field, and when he finds that treasure, it says that in his joy, he goes and sells everything he has to buy that treasure. I just find that so interesting. He discovers the treasure of the kingdom of heaven and he immediately realizes it's more valuable than everything else he has combined. But it's not just like, it's a little bit more valuable. He's like, it's a trade worth making. But like, what that's going to hurt? He's like, no, in his joy, he goes and sells everything he has to buy that treasure. And that, to me, is where it kind of lands. There's so many good things in life. There are so many blessings, so many things that are so valuable.

    [00:16:03.930] - Ed

    Status, education, wealth, who you are, your friends, relationships, all of that is fantastic. But I feel that all of that value just is so small compared to the value of getting to know Jesus and enter into his kingdom. And consequently, for me, the greatest injustice in our world is that people such as myself, who live in families and communities where I got to hear about hear about Jesus and get access to this treasure, it just seems so unfair that I've had that. But other people, simply, as a result of where they were born, where they grew up, who they know, haven't had that. So for me, the greatest injustice in our world is that so many people are unreached and no chance to meet with Jesus. No chancellor, enter into the kingdom. And the numbers, these may be slightly out of date now, but when I last looked at a research database called the Joshua Projects, they said that 42% of the world is unreached or belonging to people, groups that are unreached.

    [00:17:06.400] - JD

    So what does that mean, being unreached?

    [00:17:10.010] - Ed

    As I understand it, unreached means you live in a community where there aren't any Christians there, and particularly in communities that have never been reached by the gospel. It's just never made it so there's no way I'll be able to hear where I am. People might not be interested in knowing Jesus, but they've had a chance to hear the message and a chance to respond or not to respond. They've had that choice. If you're unreached, that choice simply isn't available to you. There's just no one to share.

    [00:17:39.140] - JD

    You often think about it in those terms of, we're looking at missions from the perspective of it obviously being very important, but also in some places, being much more neglected than in other places. It sounds like, as you mentioned, there have been many missions and opportunities and Christianization efforts in the west, but there are just places in the world that have just never had a missionary go there or a language where Jesus has never been spoken about. So were you drawn to the most neglected places as a missionary?

    [00:18:10.530] - Ed

    Yeah. And just to riff off what you were saying, there Christianity really being a global faith in many ways, this has just been in the last few hundred years that this has begun. Before then, it was just essentially locked into Europe and then, by extension, the Americas. Only recently, it's gone down to Africa and to Asia and to the majority of the world. So in that sense, it's very much a new faith for most of the world, and this is a new breaking new ground. So I certainly feel it's neglected in that sense. And why India for me? And this was something I had no idea of until God had already given me a heart for the nation. When we were launching 500K, we started doing some research. We were on the Joshua Project. We were just looking at the numbers of unreached people by different countries, and we added up the numbers for India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, just three nations in the Indian subcontinent or in the region of South Asia. And we realized that there were more unreached people in that one region, South Asia, than in the rest of the world combined. So I heard that and I just felt, wow, like, South Asia and primarily India, because of its huge size, is the outstanding need of our time.

    [00:19:29.670] - Ed

    And not only that, I felt it was the outstanding opportunity because what we had encountered was we could partner with God's church there, what he was already doing. We could send out people to plant churches into unreached villages, share the gospel. Not just share the gospel, but plant churches. And not just plant churches, but raise up new leaders who could be trained and be sent on to the next village. So in that sense, you could scale, you could multiply, giant snowball effect, all of it. So, yeah, that was what bowled us over, really. The sense of it was the outstanding need of our time and one of the outstanding opportunities of our time. And as a result, we've been working hard trying to serve India ever since.

    [00:20:13.350] - JD

    Fantastic. Yeah. It's all super interesting. I'd love to dig into so many parts of this. And I guess just to close this discussion about the need of India in particular, I think you mentioned at one point it's something like one to 2% of India would self identify as a Christian. Is that roughly correct?

    [00:20:34.810] - Ed

    That's correct. I think latest census was 2.1%.

    [00:20:38.910] - JD

    Okay. Slight uptick because of the church planting efforts in recent years. Perhaps it is also a country with tremendous nationalistic spirit. I imagine that creates unique challenges in doing missions there. Does that also create unique oppression of Christians who are looking to live out their faith?

    [00:20:57.250] - Ed

    Yeah, it's very true that there is regrettably increasing opposition, increasing persecution of Christians as well. And certainly it does seem to be tied into the spirit of nationalism that we've seen on the rise in India. And this isn't just in India. This is a global phenomenon. You'll see nationalism is increasing pretty much anywhere you look. And unfortunately, religion can get tied into nationalism, usually for significantly detrimental effects. One thing I would say is whenever the gospel is proclaimed and wherever God's spirit is moving and people are coming to know Jesus, there will be persecution. It's a regrettable fact, but it seems to be the gospel pattern. It certainly is what Jesus warns us to. And for me, it's often an indication that something is being done. Correct. Certainly if I look at London, I look at the UK, I'm not seeing a huge amount of persecution here. I'm pretty free to do whatever I want to do. But at the same time, we're not seeing Christians just joyfully witnessing, sharing their faith with other people. We're not seeing our churches rapidly expanding. And I think the two often go together. So in India, yet we're seeing a lot of people just being overwhelmed, bowled over to hear about Jesus.

    [00:22:23.010] - Ed

    In fact, it's lovely. It's like people are so spiritually hungry, people spiritually searching when they hear this message of the God who loves them and can wash away all the mistakes they've made in their lives, wash away all their sins, give them a fresh start. It's like people say, hey, this is the message I've been looking for all my life. It's beautiful. But the flip side of that is, unfortunately, there can be a heavy price of becoming a Christian. And when people do, some people can be disinherited. Some people receive threats. Normally these are transient, which is great. So often there'll be a lot of tension in the family. But after one or two years, when the family realizes that pressure isn't working, stops one being a follower of Jesus, it's it's dropped. And and frequently as well, the family will will see the witness of this person who has stood firm in the face of persecution and be won over and be intrigued to meet Jesus themselves in terms of violence, which unfortunately is also on the rise, but very much the exception rather than the norm. What we tend to see is there can be a very small minority of people who will cause trouble, which I suspect is normally the case in these kind of situations.

    [00:23:48.470] - Ed

    So most people tend to find in India are pretty interested or pretty open to hearing about another face because that's the nature of most people's beliefs there.

    [00:24:01.530] - JD

    Can we get into that a bit? I'd love also to hear a bit about the average Indians beliefs, because I can imagine someone hearing this case for converting Indians to Christianity. And I imagine there might be some more progressive Christian listeners who would think, well, maybe there is some perhaps connection to Christ or to God, even through the native belief that exists. I know that that might be not the most common Christian view, but there are some Christians who would have this view. But then also there are others who are wondering, like, what is the context in which these Indians are becoming Christian? What are the religious beliefs that they're coming from? I guess we're talking a bit around some of the caste system and some of these religiously enforced social dynamics. Could you share a bit more about where these Indians are coming from a religious beliefs perspective and also the social implications of that? Sorry, loaded question.

    [00:25:09.060] - Ed

    That's a great question and a big question. Probably where I'd start would be just like a tiny clarification and you'll have to forgive me for being pedantic, but I really don't like the word convert. I feel it can just give the wrong impression and not really be what we're about. For me, conversion is a sense of you belong to one religion, then you're joining another religion. And if that's what we're trying to do with sharing the gospel is get people that leave one team and join another team or leave one club and join another club. I'm really not interested in that at all. That's the last thing I'd want to do.

    [00:25:46.670] - JD

    In a kind of tribal way, you're saying?

    [00:25:48.800] - Ed

    Right? Exactly. Which I feel is kind of what the word convert has. But for me, sharing the gospel is about giving people the chance to meet with the creator of the universe, who loves them, who has amazing plans for their life and wants to transform them right now and forever, whatever. And that's what we're about, is trying to see people meet with Jesus and come to and step into life in all its fullness in him. So I don't like the word convert. Sorry to be pedantic. In terms of the rest of your question, what are the kind of majority beliefs that you'll find in India? So the two biggest faith groups are Islam and Hinduism. Those two are very, very different. I'll stick with the majority group, which is Hinduism, simply because it's the biggest by nature. Hinduism is a pluralistic faith, which means there's any number of gods you can worship, anyone of the pantheon, essentially. And there's actually a lot that I like about that in the sense that it's a completely normal part of Indian culture. Like, everyone is spiritual. So if you have a problem, be that, a financial problem, a relationship problem, a health problem, what everyone will do will be to go to their local temple to receive prayer, two minutes or two.

    [00:27:19.950] - Ed

    And that could be one of the prayer to one of the major gods or to one of the minor gods. It could be it could be any, but that is part of their life. Everyone is spiritually aware in a way which we're often not in the west. And that can lead a really big open door to the gospel, because let's take my life in London. I got someone and offered to pray for them. They may be like, okay, that's fine, but also a little bit weird. I kind of not really used to praying, not really used to talking about spiritual stuff. In India, you say, hey, can I? I'm a servant of God. Can I pray for you? They're like, what do you mean, for free? I'm not having to pay money to get prayer. This is great. So there's this lovely way in which, because of the way the culture is, when a Christian or a church planter is ministering to someone, they really are giving to that. They're giving to that person and giving to them something they want to hear, something they want to receive sorry. They want to be prayed for, and they want to have their spiritual needs minister too, in a way which is really very refreshing.

    [00:28:28.350] - JD

    So a big open door spiritual receptivity reminds me of that passage from Jesus where he says the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Right? Sometimes I hear this passage from a Western perspective and I think, well, is the harvest really that plentiful? I've shared the gospel with many friends and I don't see a huge take up. It's not like coming right off the crop cleaver. I don't know. Sounds like it's a different story in India, just because people are so much more spiritually open.

    [00:28:56.430] - Ed

    What I would say, I would say to that, because I think you're absolutely right. If you look through history, there seemed to be windows, windows of opportunity, if you like, where God's spirit has been at work and people have been incredibly receptive to the gospel. And if you look back through church history, you'll see that throughout the Roman world, there were times when people were open, there are times when people weren't. You see that throughout, certainly British history. There are times when people have very little interest in Jesus and suddenly it's like, wow, they want to hear. And America as well has got these incredible history of revivals. So I really feel like every nation will have its time or its times where, for whatever reason, people are open. And it's at those times where, when the good news is proclaimed, god's spirit is at work and we see, wow, the harvests are plentiful. There are other times, other seasons where it's like a bit more of a slog. We've just got to be patient and persistent and keeping faithful and serving. We may not see that amazing fruit, but that time is happening now in India, and I believe it will come again in the UK and in the States.

    [00:30:06.370] - JD

    So my father was born in India in a missionary family, and my grandfather was a pastor in India specifically. He led a seminary there. And there are three generations of Indian missionaries in my family. So this is, in a sense, very near to my story and my faith origin story. I remember my father telling this story once of villagers who wouldn't use any kinds of rat traps around their farms. And these are very poor farmers who are living under a couple of dollars a day back in the 70s or so and wouldn't use rat traps around their grain because of this deeply embedded concern for harming animals. But not just concern, even a kind of a kind of superstition about the effects of that rat trap on their afterlife. And I think even a Christian who cares about animal welfare and animal cruelty could look at the situation and just see how, yes, we should have respect and concern for God's creation. Yet at the same time, this might be a belief that is perpetuating some kind of social harm. And not to demean anyone's deeply held beliefs, but do you see any religious perspectives or social perspectives from the people that you're ministering to through your ministry that are revitalized through the gospel, where there's hope and healing and truth through the gospel that transforms that.

    [00:31:42.850] - Ed

    Your question is touching in on. Maybe just clarify your question.

    [00:31:49.330] - JD

    Yeah. For instance, this farmer after they be I don't know if this particular farmer from the story ever became a Christian, but there are stories of people who were deeply downturned in a certain caste system that was religiously enforced. Okay, that's not the same example as the rat, but there are social structures that are reinforced by religious frameworks. And sometimes these religious frameworks are not faithful to the kind of world that God wants us to create. Do you see any other kinds of liberation that comes from people becoming Christian or any kinds of freedom that comes from that? Maybe from the caste system in particular?

    [00:32:36.130] - Ed

    Yeah, okay, I'm with you. Thank you for that question. I was in India myself just a couple of months ago, and I was speaking to some very poor people in a tiny pamlet, really just about seven or eight families outside another village. And these people were from a tribal group, so they were right at the bottom of the car system. And their lives were very tough, to put it mildly. And just one of the difficulties they mentioned to me was, well, there's a borehole in the village which is just 500 meters away down the road, but they won't let us use it because of the cars that we're from, and we have to walk 2 miles to the nearest borehole instead. So I certainly think a lot of people's troubles and struggles are amplified by the car system, which is essentially a belief that your social position or your social grouping effects actually affects, like your holiness. Are you more holy than someone else or are you unclean? And if you're in that bottom group and you're unclean, then we can't have anything to do with you. So I believe that belief, that system and its origins appear to be historical.

    [00:33:53.070] - Ed

    The migrations of the Indo European peoples into the Indian subcontinent maybe 3000 years ago has brought an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering. All the troubles and struggles that you have in any society and culture as a result of poverty have been amplified and magnified. And certainly that is another reason why people find the Gospel so appealing, because the people tend to be who are most open and receptive in India. It's the same as in Jesus's time when he's in preaching in Roman Israel. It is the poor and the oppressed who are most drawn to his message. And it's the same in India. So often it's the poorest people. It's the people at the bottom of this car system who all their lives have been told, you are at the bottom of this system. You're unclean. Maybe this is because of your sins in a past life. Whatever reason it is, that's where you are, and that can never change. That's who you are. That's a part of your identity and into that context to share the message of the God who loves them. Not just the God who loves them individually, but who came to this world and gave his life and died for them that they might be set free and given a new identity, becoming children of God and co airs with Christ.

    [00:35:13.840] - Ed

    That is just absolutely revolutionary. I mean, I think that message is revolutionary for whoever you are, wherever you are in the world, but particularly in that context of the car system, it's like something people have never heard before. And this is why I just hear story after story after story after story of people hearing it, and they just just overwhelmed. Like, one guy I recently spoke to, he said, I heard this message. I was just on the floor crying for a whole hour. I was just weeping when I got it, and I experienced a joy and a peace then that I have never known before. That is how radical the message of our Lord is.

    [00:35:52.780] - JD

    In many ways. The message of the Gospel is very simple, that Christ died, christ was buried, and he was risen for our sins. And if we have trust and faith in Him, then we are heirs of that kingdom, that we belong to the kingdom of God. And it can become much more complicated, and we can make it as complicated as we want. Right? And many Christians do, and many churches have a lot of thoughts about, like, how maybe theological assumptions could play into different kinds of ministry models, for better or for worse. What theological assumptions do you make in approaching missions? Do you have this more minimal model where you say, okay, if people go from being someone who doesn't know Jesus to someone who claims to have encountered Jesus, especially in a country where this is oppressed, this is persecuted, I count that as legitimate. They don't have good reason to be lying about this, and they might not have the same exact doctrine as, like, an average person in my parish in London. Right? But the important thing is they know Jesus. Do you have that more minimal faith understanding, or do you impose on that certain other requirements, like conforming to specific creeds or a specific understanding of Scripture?

    [00:37:11.470] - Ed

    So we'll measure both. The number of people attending these church groups and the number of people who are baptized members tends to be about a ratio of three to one. What we see is a lot of people come to faith, and it's very much like the illustration of Jesus that you alluded to earlier, the seed being scattered. Loads of people come to faith, but a lot of people fall away. And it's only a minority that's people who initially accept the Gospel with joy, who become that fertile soil, and so we see the same. Most of the people who will come to faith won't make it to that stage of saying, I'm now a baptized, committed church member. So both for me, both of those are important to measure. Coming to your second part of that question, like addressing what do these people believe and potentially how do we compare that to churches in the States or churches in the UK. What people believe is absolutely crucial. And definitely everywhere we work, we have a statement of belief. Every church following group we work with has to sign up to that. And it's even Juggle Alliance statement of belief.

    [00:38:23.900] - Ed

    So everyone's being trained to get to that level. But if you imagine our churches, maybe most people have grown up in church, perhaps 10% of people have come to faith. If you're at a church in an unreached area, by definition 100% of the people in the church are going to be people who haven't gone up in church. So rather than learning it their entire life, they're just starting to learn it now. So if you were to do a cross sample and compare theological understanding in the Indian church part, in Irish Village, it's going to be a lot lower than your average American and British church. That's not because people are less interested or on the wrong track. It's just because they're on the same track, they're just a little bit further behind. And it takes time to learn that and to get it. And it's very much a journey. It always begins with someone encountering Christ. Like the women who encounter Jesus the day he rose from the dead. They had an encounter of the risen Lord Jesus. And then there is this process of discipleship, obedience, and the knowledge acquisition component as well, learning what it is Jesus teaches.

    [00:39:34.220] - Ed

    And you'll see people all the way along that journey. But the important thing is not to compromise, not to say, right, well, as you've got thus far and you don't need to go any further, it's always pushing, okay, who are the people who can be the leaders or elders in this church? Who are the people who can go off and receive the extra training to be the ones leading it for the next generation?

    [00:39:56.110] - JD

    So as an organizer, funder organizer, I'm not sure exactly how you would label yourself, but as someone who oversees these efforts and supports them, how do you measure the progress and how do you weigh these different kinds of progress? Maybe one kind being somebody who's never set foot in a church before taking that first step, coming to church compared to an additional attendance of some repeat attendee versus a baptism. Do you have any kind of internal sense of what's most valuable? And would you prefer 1000 churches that have all baptized Christians who are coming quite regularly or 100,000 churches that have very few committed believers, but everyone's quite interested? I mean, how do you even begin to make comparisons there? Let's just say you're interested in funding missions, right? And you're looking at all these different. Missions in the world, working with Christians at different stages in their development. It just seems like incredibly difficult to know or to have a sense. And maybe you can't know, right? It's not like God gave us some kind of calculus in Scripture, although I am reminded of this verse where Jesus says there's more rejoicing in heaven and among the angels when one sinner repents than when 99 who have no need of repentance, repentance.

    [00:41:21.940] - JD

    So I guess no specific question there, but how do you think about comparing the kingdom value of growth in people's faith at different points in that?

    [00:41:33.070] - Ed

    Yeah, that's a really great question. JD for me, I think there's probably two things that are crucial there. One is what's the biblical model? How does Jesus talk about church and what does that look like? And the second point, which I think would be related, would be, is this church a vibrant church or not? And that's something we've been trying to define, what is a vibrant church? And it can actually be quite difficult to do, but it's something we seem to intuitively know. I can step into a church and there could be 200 people in that church, but I could feel you know what? I don't feel any life here, any vibrance. And that for me, is pretty key. So to go back to how the Bible talks about it, Jesus, certainly when the Gospel is proclaimed, you often see signs and miracles. You see people's lives changing dramatically when they meet with Christ. You see them sharing what's happened to them with their friends, their family. And a lot of other people come into faith. That's what you see. But then you also see a lot of people not continuing along that journey. So there'll be a drop off and maybe even half, perhaps even two thirds of those people who initially heard the message, where saw some of the signs and wonders or the miracles or whatever heard the testimonies that transformed lives.

    [00:42:54.500] - Ed

    Those people initially want to enter in, but they then as soon as it comes to paying the price, they don't want to go any further. So I would be looking for churches that look like that. And what that means in reality is the church there should be new people coming into the church and new people coming to faith, and there should be those stories if you go there. Hey, what's your most recent have you got any testimonies in the last three months of someone whose life not just someone who's given their life to Christ, but a story of how their life has actually significantly changed? If there are no stories like that, then I would have a concern that this church is beginning to lose its life and to become ossified and fossilized and nothing exciting is happening. But if I'm going to a church where particularly that ratio I mentioned earlier, where there's about three people attending for each one baptized church member. And a lot of those people are new. That seems like something is being done right there. It is alive, it is dynamic. Lives are being changed. I can see that it is on a trajectory, it's going somewhere.

    [00:43:57.680] - Ed

    It's either growing or it's planting other churches. Those would be the things to be looking for. Potentially difficult to measure. But I feel we kind of I think as believers, we tend to intuitively know what I'm trying to describe there, I think.

    [00:44:16.130] - JD

    So what metrics do you think are helpful? Of course there are many that aren't helpful and there are many that just superimpose some kind of overly rigid, kind of apples to oranges comparison. But what do you think are really helpful? Metrics or KPIs for measuring kingdom impact in church planting? We talked about a couple, like number of baptisms or a number of people attending church. I presume because you measure those, you think they matter. Right? You think that it's important if we know how many people are baptized. It's important if we know how many people are setting foot in a church on Sunday. Would you say those are two of the most key metrics?

    [00:44:54.330] - Ed

    Yeah, that's what I would go for. I would go for worship groups that have been started and the number of people in those worship groups and the number of people who have taken the step of being baptized to those of you might. The three key ones I would I would look for and I wouldn't stop there. I would say it is awesome to be able to look at any moment in time and see, okay, how many worship groups are there, how many people are in these worship groups, how many people are baptized? But really I would want to be looking at essentially ten years down the road. So let's say we send a church planter in there and with our model, we've given them five years of funding. I'll be really interested to know what does that church look like ten years later? Because if it was doing fantastically well during that time of the intervention of sending the church planter in there and thriving, but then ten years later, you fast forward ten years later, there's nothing there. Okay, that was that was still an impact. There was still a lot of lights that were people who got to meet with the Lord.

    [00:45:56.680] - Ed

    But really what you want to see is a long term church plant. A church that is financially independent, is healthy, vibrant, financially independent, and is there for the long haul that is still there in 20 years time. And in 20 years'time it's still multiplying. It's still reaching out into other places. Setting up new branch churches upon the.

    [00:46:17.940] - JD

    Other churches itself seems like a very good sign. Of course, if it's sending people, then it's creating that kind of spiritual depth that is able to it's a wellspring. You're able to draw up from that and share that with other people.

    [00:46:31.310] - JD

    Right? Yeah. I've heard people talk about width. Length and depth, the width being, okay, what's the impact? How many worship groups are there? How many people are in them? The length would be like, okay, well, what's the quality? That I think can be quite difficult to evaluate. And probably the closest we have come to it is those stories. Are we having fresh stories of people's lives being transformed by the gospel? And the depth component, I really like because that's like saying, okay, well, what does it look like in the future, ten years down the line? Is it still going or has it collapsed? And that's key because if there isn't that depth component, then the impact is limited.

    [00:47:15.210] - JD

    So can we talk a bit about how it is we know what's happening on the ground and how it is we from DC, where I'm based, from London, where you're based. Really know what's happening in these rural villages in India.

    [00:47:28.270] - Ed

    Yeah, another great question. It's a really important issue, actually, because I'd call it report. Inflation is a very big issue in the missional space, particularly in places where church is growing very rapidly. Sometimes it can be deliberately deceptive. People think if they just make up higher numbers, they might be able to get more funding. That can be a problem more often. I think it's just a difference of a lack of precision, which may be cultural. So in the west, we might be very good at properly counting everyone. In certain other cultures, it might be like, oh, I've seen this group of people and I feel like that's 50 people.

    [00:48:15.280] - Ed

    Yeah, 50 people.

    [00:48:16.620] - Ed

    Right, right. When you count it, it's like 50. So it's a big issue. And for me, it all comes down to report verification. That's crucial. And report verification can only work if you have people doing the report verification who aren't a part of the organization, whose reports are being verified. And this was something that we figured out the hard way, really. It was only three or four years ago that we made that change. Before we had it was only within a church funding group we were working with that we had people doing that verification. We then set up our own independent team who report just to 500K. So there are 500K staff. They go out, they're visiting the church plants, they're visiting the regional leaders. They're seeing those churches. They're saying, okay, this is roughly approximate to what has been reported. Unless you're doing that, frankly, there's a high chance that whatever is reported, it'll probably relate to the truth. But it could be two times bigger, five times bigger, ten times bigger than what is really happening on the ground.

    [00:49:25.420] - Ed

    Yeah. I mean, there's some Christian orgs out there that claim to have introduced hundreds of millions of people to the gospel through various different kinds of tracks. It's quite dumbfounding how these things make it past the proofreads, but it seems like there's a huge challenge here and also for small missions and people who are just getting started, entrepreneurs in this space, if we can call them that. But like, church planters who are just getting started off or are monitoring over a few dozen or just a couple hundred, like, it seems like so much work is being put towards faithfully sharing the gospel that there's not much time left to think about measurement. But it still seems so important given that there are this high prevalence of exaggerated reporting. So did your group about three, four years ago, undertake some kind of, like, sampling of random churches to get a sense of, like, okay, what is the reported attendance compared to the actual attendance? And can we, like, you know, assume that this is representative of the broader population? How did you more specifically go about that? Did you literally have a third party go in every single church and count the number of attendees, ask people if they were baptized?

    [00:50:43.850] - JD

    Because certainly you didn't do all that work, but what did you do more specifically?

    [00:50:50.110] - Ed

    Yeah, I just came back to what you said about the report inflation. I think if everything that's been reported, if people come into faith is true, then the whole world has been converted, like, three times over already. Right. So what we started doing was we got staff members now three people in this team, we call them field associates. What they do is they go out, and within a two year cycle, they will visit every church planter. And they won't visit every single church plant in person because we would need a lot more staff to do that. What they'll do is they will go and all the church planters are organized underneath supervisors. So if we've got 800 church planters, we've got about 150 supervisors. They're the leaders who look after them, organize them, mentor them. We call the church planters underneath a supervisor. Those five or six church funders, that's a cluster. They'll have a meeting once a month. So our team who go out and do the verification, they will go and attend a cluster meeting. They will meet all the church planters there. They will speak to the supervisor privately and say, look, you have visited all of these churches.

    [00:52:10.800] - JD

    Do these numbers look approximately correct when you went to the worship meeting as what reported correlates with your reality? And they'll kind of get a yes or a no based on that, and then they will go and see one or two of those church plants themselves, like a sample, like you were saying, to see if okay, is what the supervisor is reported accurate? Certainly in the case of the sample, or is it way off in this.

    [00:52:35.510] - JD

    Those who check, how are they funded? Are there incentives aligned to make sure that the reporting is as honest as possible?

    [00:52:47.590] - Ed

    Yeah, within our system, there's no real incentives to exaggerate because people support, as I mentioned, just under $1,000 a year. They get that support for a five year period regardless of how fast their church is growing or how slow their church is growing. If they've got five people in their church after that five year period, the support comes to a stop. If they've got 500 people, and I think we've only got one person in that camp, his support still comes to stop at the same way at the end of that period. So that's what they know. The expectation is clear and yeah, for the reasons you mentioned, it means you don't punish people for success. Oh well, you've built a judge super fast, so we're going to cut your support sooner. But it doesn't incentivize making up reporting numbers either because people aren't getting paid extra if they do super well.

    [00:53:41.270] - JD

    This model, is it being done also by other Christian church planting orgs in South Asia and how many of them are there and is this movement, I think, discipleship making movement, could we group it under that broader category?

    [00:54:03.390] - Ed

    I would make a subtle distinction. People do use these terms somewhat interchangeably. For me, the key of a church planting movement, I would say 500K, is in the camp of church planting movement. So that's very much sending out church planters. And within our model, those are people who have received a training typically for one year, but can be longer. It's common on the ground in India and that there are a lot of people who are setting up these training centers and groups like us are plugging in and supporting them. Another group which does something similar is called MPART. The difference is they will build each of the training centers, bible quotes where they then send people out from. We're finding ones that are organically growing and then partnering a disciple making movement. The key distinction with that, I would say, is that a disciple making movement, people don't that you cut out the training center and the Bible college step. So it's actually quite different in many ways. So you don't have someone who's been intensively trained for that six month or one year or two year period, which is advantages and disadvantages. Disadvantages. That person is less trained, might have a less solid grasp of what it is to lead a church and to teach people in the word of God.

    [00:55:25.510] - Ed

    The advantage is that you don't have the cost of sending that person to be trained intensively. And similarly, that person may not have to be salaried because they might be doing this work alongside their job. So they just one or two evenings a week, they're starting to do some ministry. So the benefits of a disciple making movement, whereas very much the emphasis much more on, okay, do you have a disciple who's making another disciple? The cost can be lower and you can have very rapid growth. The weak point is you don't have that same intensive level of training, so there's a higher risk of lower quality church plants or churches going off track or synchronism or absorbing other beliefs or not teaching what the Bible teaches makes sense.

    [00:56:16.100] - JD

    What is that training like? So you said six to twelve months at one of many different Bible colleges around around India. Do these Bible colleges vary quite a lot in terms of their doctrinal standards and their denominational leanings or is there some common? Of course the commonality is presumably they all believe in Jesus and they all preach the Gospel and use Scripture. How would you summarize the uniqueness of each Bible college or the similarities across the mall?

    [00:56:51.490] - Ed

    Each of these church party groups that we work with, our team on the ground will go in and they will vet the training center and make sure it's on track. By and large, they're fairly similar in that they are making sure that all the key tenets of Christianity are being taught. So that is, what are the doctrines which are key to salvation? What does it mean to be a foreign Jesus? How does salvation come to pass? How does sanctification work? How do we get to heaven? What is heaven? All the key basic tents of Christianity, those will be covered. And then they'll all have a strong practical component as well, which is, okay, you've got the theory, you know, what it is to run a church and to preach what it is that people need to learn. But do you have the practical skills to actually go into a village and to start ministering there? Because that's a big skills gap, which, if you said to me, right, I want you to go and plan a church in your part of London, I'd be like, Where do I start? And how am I going to minister when people are coming to me saying my family are threatening to disinherit me because I've come to Jesus?

    [00:58:08.590] - JD

    Have you been given the skills to minister to that person and to counsel and coach them through that situation? Or have you been taught how to raise up more leaders so that they could take over that church when it's time for you to move on, or when you're too old to lead or raise up new leaders so you can go and plant the next church? So very much a theological component, but also a heavy, heavy practical component. And you'll see variations, but what's more striking is the similarities I have found, largely because I think there's a core which you need for people to be successful. And if you start swapping out any of those key ingredients, it's not going to work.

    [00:58:52.650] - JD

    I want to ask again about this, but I don't want to be too critical, right, because I'm sympathetic to this more basic model of trust where if we preach people the Gospel and we provide Scripture and we train them, that's sufficient. But I think there are some who would listen and think, well, there are many Christians in the world. Many Christians disagree about what scripture really teaches. I don't want to support a mission that's teaching a certain interpretation. I'm only going to support a mission within my unique denomination. What do you say to that kind of concern? And is it just the case that what these Bible colleges are teaching, these simple truths about salvation, about the gospel, these are things that almost all Christians would agree about? Or what do you say to the criticism?

    [00:59:43.600] - Ed

    But also that right, okay, I'm with you. For me, I suppose I would ask that person, well, what's the impact would you ultimately care about the most? Do you want to see a world where more and more people are encountering Jesus having their life transformed by him? Or do you want to see a world which has the same number of Christians as we have, but like they all have the same opinion as you when it comes to do he baptize children or not? Or they have the same interpretation as you of is Jesus going to come back and literally rain on the world for 1000 years? Or no, that's not going to happen. The entire universe is going to be wrapped up in the blink of an eye. That would be the question I would ask, what for you is more valuable, people following Jesus and the way that he teaches or getting Christians to join our particular tribe, our particular doctrine? And what I tend to find is people, most Christians I know, they know what really matters and what they care about the most, and that is people. We all share this fact that Jesus has transformed our lives more than anything else has, and we want other people to share in that.

    [01:00:51.090] - Ed

    And if that's the priority, then people become pretty quick to say, okay, I don't really mind if they're teaching baptizing infants or they're not teaching baptizing infants. Those are secondary matters. What really matters is the primary stuff.

    [01:01:03.990] - JD

    It sounds like a kind of mere Christianity, right? Thinking of CS. Lewis and just talking about these essentials that most all Christians share and this power that Christ has in our lives. And that's the ethos that you are championing in the church planting.

    [01:01:20.350] - Ed

    That's it. You've exactly got it. And that's one of the things that we quite commonly find ourselves saying. Our passion is to see India reach for the gospel and to empower as much of the evangelical church in India as we can to see that happen. And we want to get as much of the evangelical church in the rest of the world to get behind it. And that's basically it. We're not about tribes and names. Do you follow Paul? Do you follow Apollo? No. We're all followers of Christ and that's what really matters.

    [01:01:59.030] - JD

    I'd like to transition now to talking about careers, career, advice for Christians, especially analytically minded Christians who are interested in thinking about these things or really maximizing the good they can do in missions. And to start off that question, would you encourage that people try to replicate what you're doing in India as some kind of organizer? What would be your advice or your warning for people who want to pursue a similar path?

    [01:02:28.430] - Ed

    Wow, I've never actually thought about that. I've always been very keen to encourage people to pursue high income earning degrees through careers so they can donate to support highly affected mission work. Wherever that's 500K, wherever that's one of the other many very effective mission organizations out there. But that's an interesting perspective. Could somebody do what we've done and set up their own group? I think they definitely could.

    [01:02:59.550] - JD

    Presumably there are many more unfunded pastors coming out of these seminaries or church planting teaching organizations. They would need this kind of funding. And I guess that's also a question as well. I don't know the space well enough to know is there considerable more need for people to do the organizing work that you're doing? Is that in India, or is that instead in Indonesia or in other places in the world?

    [01:03:27.970] - Ed

    Right. Yeah. I mean, the amount of need is enormous. I think we're just like scratching the surface of it. So I think we need a lot of people both to pursue high income careers so they can donate to support. We need a lot of people to be having roles more similar to mind and being a part of those organizations, doing that, empowering distributing those funds, helping the strategies on the ground. I suppose the particular question of, well, if someone wanted to go down the road of they're not earning to give, but they are wanting to give their time to be a part of an organization, the question would be, okay, well, do I join an existing organization like 500K or Mission India or Empire or New Generations? Do I join one of those clips or do I start a new one? And that's a very interesting question. I think it's always important that people are starting new things because that's where you have an entrepreneurial spirit. When things are tried differently, you may find an effective way of doing it. At the same time, I think it's only like nine out of ten organizations that have started fail.

    [01:04:35.030] - JD

    So essentially it's high risk and it's high reward.

    [01:04:38.960] - JD

    And even if it doesn't fail, it might not have a huge impact. Right. Like, you might create an organization and get enough donations, but it might not be really moving the needle in a significant way.

    [01:04:49.230] - Ed

    Exactly. And there's all these components of the due diligence side checking that funds have been correctly used, verifying the reports. That's all pretty difficult. And there's a cost incurred when you're starting up, when you're learning that, which we've found as well, to be honest, the easiest thing would be to get plugged into an existing organization, come join 500K. But there will always be a space for people being called to start to start something new. And there's always an energy around that as well.

    [01:05:24.150] - JD

    Do you think starting at university there are specific majors that can help train people better? I mean, you said pursue a major that can help you earn a high salary. Perhaps also as a backup, you could pursue a career just to earn in order to fund missionaries like you did with medicine. And it sounds like the career fields there are pretty obvious. But are there any unique skills or majors that people could have while at university that would help them be really, I guess, give them quite a lot of career capital in the Christian missions world?

    [01:05:58.850] - Ed

    That is a very interesting question. I think my personal experience and where I've wound up my degree hasn't really helped me at all for what I do beyond being a helpful tool for income generation.

    [01:06:15.270] - JD

    It's a good signal of trustworthiness too. Right? If you come from the medical profession, it's well known that people trust doctors more than the average Joe, and hopefully we trust the average Joe too. But yeah, I would imagine maybe if you're going around talking to churches and you share this story about how you entered the medical field, it shows that you didn't have to become a missionary. You certainly didn't have to leave the comfort of London in order to preach the gospel in India, but you decided to do so. By no means a charlatan in doing this and there's no personal gain in doing this. And the fact that you have this other option in London, I think it builds trust. I wonder, especially in an area like missions, where there's so little centralized information about what's really happening, trust building seems incredibly valuable. And people trust firemen, they trust doctors. I'm not sure who else we trust but teachers as well.

    [01:07:21.470] - Ed

    Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's always something very valuable about being bivocational in the sense that I am. And in that respect, medicine lends itself very well to do a couple of days of work and then to pay the bills, doing mission stuff on the side. Equally, if you can set up your own business and then the business can take care of itself or you hire someone else to run the business. Very easy to be bivocational. Just thinking about I was just thought about your question in a different way. What would be skills or what qualifications might be great for someone getting into the mission space? I thought about that from the sense of who would I be if I could pick any bunch of people to come work for me in 500K? What skills would I be wanting? People with technology backgrounds would be very value adding.

    [01:08:08.750] - JD

    What kinds of tech developers, web developers or you mean like programmers?

    [01:08:15.570] - Ed

    Yeah, I mean, a full stack developer would be most helpful just because of the flexibility. They can do the back end stuff and the front end stuff. But that skill set generally is very helpful in that I think there is a normal smartphone penetration is coming very high. I think it's about 50% in India now and that's only going to increase. A lot of missions will do their reporting on paper and then potentially in Excel spreadsheets the potential to make things far more effective through digital forms, through phones which have apps, which have content on them. There's a huge scope of potential and that's something that we have found ourselves leaning into. So I think any kind of development programming background will be worth a lot next. The other useful skills would be an MBA or management consulting experience. Do you know how organizations, what it takes for an organization to run well and this can be a big problem, I think in the third sector generally, in the charity world generally, there's often not much of a link between an organization's fundraising capacity and actually how good its operations are. Whereas in the business world you don't have that issue.

    [01:09:40.010] - Ed

    If your operations are math, no one's going to buy your product. In the charity world, your interventions could be terrible, but you've got a great marketing department so you keep getting loads of money in. And as a result, I think charities and missions by extension as well often aren't running as efficiently and as effectively as some of their peers in the corporate world. And the more people we have who have that kind of knowledge and experience of best practice and how organizations work really well, they can have a big impact, big, big impact in the mission space.

    [01:10:12.630] - JD

    Do you think that starting someone's career in missions in some ways closes off opportunities to pursue private sector careers in the event that they decide on missions isn't what God is calling them towards? Maybe there's a case to be made for building up career capital that could be useful for both missions and for private sector or other sector work. So for instance, gaining the skills to become a doctor, right? If 500K hadn't worked out, you still could work as a doctor. Not that it's ever so helpful when you have a start up to think in this kind of two track way. Sometimes it's good to have all your eggs in one basket. But for people who maybe aren't sure exactly what kind of missions work they would like to do or what mission they'd like to be a part of, it sounds like building transferable career capital, like a medical degree, like these skills with web development, like an MBA and management experience is really valuable. That's what I'm picking up from you.

    [01:11:15.060] - Ed

    Yeah. Well, just to clarify, when I was just talking about working in the mission space, I was envisaging somebody doing something fairly similar to what. I'm doing or working in an organization like which is all about essentially empowering indigenous work. So that's what I'm speaking to. I just want to check are we on the same track there or were you talking about people being a missionary on the front?

    [01:11:40.270] - JD

    I think there's probably a lot of overlap, although, correct me if I'm wrong, between the kinds of skills you would need to do the work you're doing well, and then what other mission orgs need? Although, you know what? You're doing is much more entrepreneurial, much more startup ish compared to some of the larger development or Christian development orgs and Christian mission orgs that have thousands of employees across the world.

    [01:12:05.690] - Ed

    Right.

    [01:12:06.600] - JD

    And I would say push back if that's wrong. It sounds like you're pointing at some deeper distinction there.

    [01:12:14.570] - Ed

    Yeah, well, I think I wouldn't be a big supporter of anyone in today's world being a missionary in the traditional sense, like my heroes evolved Hudson Taylor I wouldn't recommend anyone doing that partly it's just becoming very difficult to a lot of governments won't take Westerners coming in as missionaries like Hudson Taylor did. Secondly, it's incredibly expensive. Thirdly, I think it's people often aren't very effective. They don't know the language, they don't know the culture. All kinds of barriers are there plus the world is a different world to when Hudson Taylor went. When he went, there was nothing, there was nothing, there was no indigenous church at all. Now, like, in every country in the world, there is something there is some indigenous church, and I think the ability to leverage and to fan into flames that spark which is already there, that is high impact. And anyone in the mission space. I would have thought it would be best for me to be working in a mission organization like 500k. Or if they're on the fields themselves, they would be there to say, how can I be here as a friend to be not doing the work myself, but trying to identify our Led tools which I can help this help this indigenous group to possess to be more effective tools or trainings or whatever those opportunities for leverage are there.

    [01:13:39.580] - Ed

    There can be a lot of low hanging fruit, but I think it should always be about empowering the organizations that are already there, rather than it being about me as a missionary. I'm going to go out and do the advantages of myself or I'm going to go and be the church planter myself.

    [01:13:54.010] - JD

    So you really believe in doing the indigenous missionary work and also in the less traditional context, is this a very strong belief for you? Would you ever recommend somebody work within a more traditional Christian mission.org?

    [01:14:12.530] - Ed

    I would never say never. There's obviously calling, which I don't want to push aside. I think God will always call people to do cross cultural missionary work in the traditional sense. That's always going to happen. So I would never want to say people shouldn't do that. What I would say is I think we can very easily think we've been called to do something when really it's just our own heart's desire we feel led into doing that, and we need to be careful because scripture teaches us that human heart is deceitful above all other things. So I don't want to say people aren't going to be called to do that, but I would encourage everyone just to stop and reconsider and say, okay, is this really God? Or is this just my desire for the kind of life that I would like to live?

    [01:15:02.030] - JD

    Right. This back of the envelope calculation is incredible. Just the difference and impact between encouraging indigenous missionaries versus sending yourself or your neighbor from the UK or from the US. It costs something, like you said, $100,000 to send a family to India for a year. That's what I've heard from others as well. And it costs roughly around 1000 or a couple of fund an indigenous church planter. So right there, that's like at least ten x, maybe possibly 100 x more impactful. Do you think that's a naive calculation? Do you think that's really missing other important factors? You mentioned calling as well, but is it really that simple that indigenous missionary work is just so much more impactful than the traditional models?

    [01:15:54.370] - Ed

    Well, I would actually say it's an underestimate because I think you've got the 100 x leverage in terms of cost. But I think the indigenous church planter is probably going to lead maybe five times, ten times the number of people to faith that someone coming from another country will just because, you know, how many people have I led to faith in my life talking in two or three? Why should I expect more success on the mission field than what I've had in my life in London? Whereas these guys and the indigenous people are seeing way more. So I think potentially that's actually a conservative estimate that 100 x multiplier the caveat. I would say that's comparing the traditional missionary, if someone was going out and they had a strategic opening which could potentially significantly leverage organizations, church planning groups, church planting movements and I do know people who have done this, they have had enormous impact by starting something or by catalyzing something, which is then catalyzing an indigenous movement, which has then become huge. So I think they could not necessarily it depends on that person is doing, who's going into the mission. Are they going in the traditional sense, being the operator themselves, doing the mission work, or is there a strategic opening for them to really find the flames, some indigenous work that is already happening or is ready to be started?

    [01:17:16.410] - JD

    Then how do you think of the value of groups that do Bible translation or other kinds of, let's just say, digital technologies that help facilitate the transfer of scripture or the availability of it? Do you think of this as kind of like infrastructure. It's hard to measure the direct impact of a little bit more clean water in Africa, but you have to build up an entire infrastructure to provide clean water in Africa in a similar way in India. You have to build up an infrastructure of availability of scripture tracks and also scripture in different languages. Even if it's hard to measure the impact of one more well, one more scripture track in a person's language. I'm trying to draw analogies from the development world into the missions world. It's hard right to compare it's hard to think about what would be the value of these. Really hard to measure efforts in Christian missions like Bible translation. Of course, we know you need scripture in your own language, but how do you think about that? As a church planter, did you ever think I should work to promote Bible translation instead of missions?

    [01:18:31.730] - Ed

    Brilliant question. And yeah, we must have scripture in people's heart languages, right, that matter so much, so, so important. So I see why people are so behind this. I'll ask you a question, JD. Do you have any idea how many languages there are in the world?

    [01:18:47.210] - JD

    I think it's like 6000 or so.

    [01:18:49.990] - Ed

    Yeah, I think so. I think last I heard it was 5000 or five and a half thousand. Do you know how many there are forecasts to be in 100 years'time?

    [01:18:56.990] - JD

    I think it's something like half that, right? Something like 2000 or 3000.

    [01:19:00.990] - Ed

    What I heard was it was 500. Yeah. Don't quote me on this data because I did some research and I'm now going off my memory, but from what I read, it was 90% of the language that are currently spoken will no longer be spoken by anyone in 100 years time. So the language is going extinct. I don't know if it's one every was it every two weeks or every two months? Don't quote me. You might be able to quickly yell at the numbers and be like, no, you just said that wrong. But it's something like that. Language extinction is happening extremely quickly. And even today, I think it's something like 95% of the world speaks is a speaker of the top 20 languages. So 95% of people already can read the Bible. They can read gospel tracts in one of those 20 languages. And those 20 languages are covered with great tracks, with great scripture.

    [01:19:56.670] - JD

    95% of the world can be reached in a language that has a Bible translation already?

    [01:20:04.990] - Ed

    So I would want to check my numbers, but I think when I read, it was 95%.

    Maybe not a heart language quote, unquote, but it is a language that they understand at some level.

    [01:20:13.670] - Ed

    Yeah. And to be fair, it will probably be the language they're used to reading in, because those 20 languages, these are just the languages which are used everywhere in commerce and industry. So most of the translation work that, as far as I know, is being done into languages that are spoken by a very small group of people. And those languages will be extinct in 100 years time and we're not going to change that. These forces are way beyond our control.

    [01:20:45.730] - JD

    The trajectory of these language is a sociological reality, perhaps, but it sounds like you're thinking about missions and the impact of missions from a perspective of even not just the next hundred years, but many generations after that. India is a big country, it's not going anywhere in the next 100 or 500 years. Right. And it sounds like you're looking for a kingdom impact that ripples through time.

    [01:21:10.280] - Ed

    Right, exactly. That's it. Exactly. And that's exactly what I go for. What's the kingdom impact? And language translation is very cost intensive and the impact in 100 years time will be like, hey, it's pretty cool. The only record of this now extinct language is like a bit of the New Testament, which is kind of cool. But the only people who will ever take an interest in that in the future will be people doing obscure PhDs and other kind of research. So in terms of the legacy of the world and people knowing Jesus, I think in most situations, these resources can be better invested in sharing the gospel, launching church, finding movements, instigating disciple making movements, seeing a world where people know Jesus and obedient and love him. That's going to happen through using predominantly scriptures that have already been translated, and through simply getting boots on the ground and getting people going out and sharing this message and teaching people how to obey.

    [01:22:12.890] - JD

    That's a bit of a hot take, I think, in the Christian world, if you were to put one form of missions over another, but it just seems intuitively true that not all forms of missions are equally impactful. I don't feel like I'm knowledgeable personally. I'm knowledgeable enough in this space to know what is night and day way better than everything else. But this indigenous mission work seems quite promising. Are there any other common draws for missionaries that you think are well intentioned, but may be worth avoiding for having the most kingdom impact?

    [01:22:47.590] - Ed

    Well, yeah, I think, again, I was talking about these windows of opportunity earlier, so, like, look at the I don't know, let's go with the Great Awakening in the UK and the USA message revival. Loads of people came to faith like God's spirit was working. If I had to choose a time to invest resources in the UK and the USA, I would have done it at that moment in time, because God's spirit doesn't work. And right now we can see that's what is happening in India as we speak, whereas we weren't seeing that 100 years ago when British missionaries were there and missionaries from other nations. And I would essentially see the same for translation. When William Carey went to West Bengal and was the founder of modern missions and translated the Bible into Bengali and a bunch of other languages that was incredibly value adding. Like the kingdom impact that that act had was enormous because suddenly people who only spoke Bengali could access the word of God when before they couldn't they could read it for themselves. I mean that was unbelievably impactful. I just think that all that low hanging fruit has now been picked and all the languages, all the working languages which people are speaking on a day to day basis and are reading they're in those top 20 languages.

    [01:24:05.710] - Ed

    Maybe a few exceptions but something like 95% low hanging fruit has been fixed.

    And I think in the west we are very highly educated people so we are always going to have a bias towards activities which are actually stimulating work. Yes, which it is. But in terms of transformation for Jesus I think that fruit has been picked and now it's about finding the flame of movements.

    [01:24:38.810] - JD

    A couple more questions on careers for Christians who are discerning a vocation for missions in the most impactful senses. What are some conferences or some working communities that Christians can get involved in to meet others in this space? I went to the One Accord conference a couple of months ago and I met some other people doing work that you're doing at least similar to it church planting in India. I'll have to look up the exact orgs later and ask you about it. But do you know of any other conferences where you meet like minded peers who are doing similar work? Maybe that someone in undergrad or a recent grad could go to to meet people like you and learn more about it?

    [01:25:19.620] - Ed

    Yeah, I'm wondering whether you should be telling me these conferences, JD, since you've been to one and I've been to zero, I'm in London. We have a lot less going on in the missional space than you guys do in the States. You're in an enviable position. Accord sounds great. I'm just thinking of other groups. There is a group called 20 414 which is looking at the movement space particularly trying to see disciple making movements happening everywhere around the world. And and they are you can't donate 20 414 in themselves, but they are a great network, a great launching place for knowing more certainly what Andy Krisma is doing as a part of effective altruism for Christians and his research into effective mission organizations. I think that's a very good place to start and another great place might just be going to some of the big Christian foundations. The one which brings to mind is the McLellan Foundation but there are others and just saying hey, what have you learned, what do you know, what would you recommend? These foundations often have a lot of knowledge and a lot of learning because they've been funding.

    [01:26:35.770] - JD

    We have a program officer who's specialized in indigenous missions or discipleship making movements.

    [01:26:43.090] - Ed

    Right.

    [01:26:44.690] - JD

    If anyone is familiar with that, please reach out, send us an email. We'd love to get more connected with them and help equip future Christians working in this area. And then finally, for short term mission trips or learning experiences like what you did to India, what would you recommend for other Christians to do? How do you get started, right? If you don't know anybody? I'm not sure how you started, actually, how exactly you ended up going to India. When you were there, you met these church planters who needed funding. But did that just happen by way of Providence? And how can Christians trying to make Providence work towards their career in missions work a little quicker? How can they have a good experience, a good short term mission trip that teaches them about this area?

    [01:27:39.810] - Ed

    I would really recommend exposure to traveling and seeing these places. I mean, that's what happened to me, and that can potentially be very, very impactful. That changed the trajectory of my life, and I think it could change the trajectory of other people who are on that place as well. What I would really encourage them to do would be to find an organization which is doing well, what they're passionate about. So if you're passionate about seeing lots of people come to faith and come to know Jesus, I would say come and visit India with 500K in one of our teams. Or do that to one of the other organizations that I've mentioned, like New Generations or Mission India or one of the groups within 20 414. Definitely get out there, definitely see it, but try and get exposed to some people who are really on the cutting edge of the missional world.

    [01:28:31.040] - JD

    Got it.

    [01:28:32.230] -

    And we take teams out. Contact me. It's ed@500k.com.

    [01:28:38.230] - JD

    Great. Any final thoughts or also any other orgs in this space that you would encourage people to explore?

    [01:28:50.330] - Ed

    I think I mentioned all the organizations which I'm aware of. Other good ones are beyond I think they're beyond have been doing some great stuff and some good work on the quantitative side as well, and analyzing. But beyond that, that's probably the limit of my knowledge in terms of good organizations. My final thoughts would be just to encourage people. If Jesus is the best thing that has ever happened to you and you want to give other people that same opportunity, that same privilege, then just throw yourself into it. Throw like heart and soul, throw yourself in. I love those words from one John chapter three, where he says, this is how we know what love is. Jesus Christ laid down his life for us, and so we also should lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. That just flaws me every time I read it. Wow, that is a definition of love. It is God himself, Jesus himself, dying for me and him saying, ed, you need to be equally radical. What's been given to you, you need to give it forward, give it to others, be sacrificial. But I'd say don't stop there.

    [01:30:10.740] - Ed

    Don't stop with being sacrificial. Like, sacrificial is working hard, but we also need to work smart. We all know this. Like hard work is great, but we need to work smart. And that is where effectiveness comes in and that is where impact comes in. And that is something that Jesus talks about a lot as well. We need to be shrewd managers. We need to bring a return on what he has given to us. We need to, as Paul says, run the race in such a way as to win the prize, becoming all things to all people. So it doesn't just matter being radically generous, it also matters how do we do that? How do we use our minds and wisdom that God has given us because the stakes are high. There's a world that needs to hear about Jesus and us. Giving our all for that and giving our all for that in a strategic way is what is going to make the difference. You have got an amazing life which God has given you. He has an incredible call on your life. Don't waste that. Just jump right in and use it all for his kingdom and for his glory.

    [01:31:20.180] - JD

    Awesome, Ed. Thanks so much.

    [01:31:22.080] - Ed

    Thank you.

 

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JD Bauman
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